A new premise on poets
Poets are like an analogy to b-girls.
Lots of young women and men try break-dancing and the other elements of hip-hop.
Some of them do it for exercise, some for socializing, some for a love of music and art.
For some, it's a pastime; for others, a passion.
Those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of hip-hop, its core values and its fifth element can call themselves b-girls.
Poetry is a genre of writing.
It seems mysterious because it breaks boundaries.
Sometimes there's no punctuation,
Sometimes there's no capitalization,
Sometimes there's nothing but
punctuation and capitalization.
It relies on sound, on language, on beat.
There are rules for certain poetic forms,
and people who profess an expertise with those forms.
And there are no rules.
There is this thing called free verse.
I remember J.T. Stewart, poet and poetic teacher extraordinaire.
If it has a period, call it a sentence and prose.
If it doesn't want a period, call it a line and poetry.
J.T. writes like a scholar, and sometimes not.
My other poet mentors
My other poet mentor is Anastacia Tolbert.
Just let the prose flow
seems to be her mantra.
She has no problem raising her voice
when appropriate,
belting out words in rhyme,
in time,
in orders that are fine
coarse ground
or not.
Her flow of prose
is relaxing, soothing,
and energizing.
She makes poetry
fun.
Like Susan Schultz,
queen of the prose poem
and other forms, too.
What do you do for inspiration?
I asked her once.
Watch baseball,
she blurted out.
I wanted to hear something more ethereal
from the lips of a poet.
The blunt St. Louis honest admission
of indulgence in America's great pasttime
didn't seem,
well,
poetic enough.
But the first day of class
in Susan's graduate workshop
had me laughing so hard
that I didn't care whether poetry
was ethereal or not.
That thing called voice
So at the Iowa Writers' Workshop
the poetry didn't work.
It was weird to be around people
conscious of being poets
when I was anything
but.
I ran away from poetry
into a workshop on voice
where I was told that my voice
was like a poet's,
staccato, punctuated, biting,
funny, and crass.
Which led me to voice,
and the premise that
everyone has one,
and if you find yours,
you've got a personal set
of speakers that will amplify you
and your language
for life.
Wildness
I think I prose
better than I poeticize
but sometimes I get the urge
to wildly create breaks
and to play with language
and rhythm
and ignore the periods that make
lines a sentence
instead of a line,
prose instead of poems.
I try not to take myself seriously,
and I throw down
big, grandiose blogs,
hoping it's true that no one will ever read them,
wondering and wishing sometimes
that someone would.
The course
Self-Promotion
for the
Chronically
Humble
Writer
is supposed to be
about all of us,
and why we need to be
less humble.
Sometimes, I fear myself
to be too arrogant.
The nail that sticks out
on the slab of wood,
the one that tries to hide
the fact that she can't be
hammered out, and disguised.
What if
If I weren't a writer, I would
read more books, or not.
probably watch a lot of TV.
probably eat TV dinners and processed food.
I might be overweight,
under-stimulated,
bored with life,
waiting for death.
Because I'm a writer, I am
eccentric.
funny
dedicated
healthy
somewhat inane
sometimes insightful
often inappropriate
generally whole.
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